Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Public XtreemFS demo server online again

Do you want to test XtreemFS without installing the servers first?

No problem! Just install the XtreemFS Client 1.3 (currently available for Linux and MacOSX, Windows will follow later) and mount our public XtreemFS demo server:

mkdir ~/xtreemfs_demo
mount.xtreemfs demo.xtreemfs.org/demo ~/xtreemfs_demo
cd ~/xtreemfs_demo

We placed a copy of the freely available short film "Big Buck Bunny" on the demo server which you can watch after mounting. (Please keep in mind that your Internet connection to our demo server has to be fast enough to watch it smoothly.)


For testing you can create any directories and files as you like. Please do not upload anything illegal or copyrighted material. For legal reasons every file create/write is logged with the IP address and timestamp. Files are automatically deleted every hour.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Upgrading from XtreemFS 1.2.x to 1.3

The good news is that the on-disk formats of the DIR, MRC and OSD haven't changed which means that just need to update the packages. The bad news is that 1.2.x and 1.3.0 are protocol-incompatible, you can't mix 1.2.x servers/clients with 1.3.0 servers/clients.

To upgrade servers, shut them down. Install the 1.3 packages (or update if you have the xtreemfs repository configured) and start the servers again. For the clients, unmount all mounted volumes and install (or update) the 1.3.0.

Most important changes in the user-interface:
  • mount.xtreemfs has new command line options
  • xtfs_stat, xtfs_repl and xtfs_sp have been merged into xtfsutil
  • xtfsutil works on files on mounted volumes, not on URLs
  • you can use xtfsutil --errors /mount/point to retrieve client error messages

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

First Release Candidate for XtreemFS 1.3

After nearly one year of development, we have finished the first release candidate for XtreemFS 1.3.
The most important new feature is the cross-site file replication with auto-failover. The new replication works with mutable files, i.e. files can be read and written.

We have created packages for Linux in our repositories on build.opensuse.org, they should become available within a few hours. For Mac OS X, we have a packaged client with installer. The sources can be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/xtreemfs/downloads/list.